Valve

The third of three binding announcements has been made this week surrounding Valve's big move toward living room gaming: SteamOS, Steam Machines, and now the Steam Controller. This machine is a next-generation solution to the relatively stagnant state of gaming controllers in the market today, working with two large trackpads, haptic feedback, and a touchscreen in the middle. There are a total of 16 buttons and/or pads on this single controller, and it'll be entirely wireless, too.

This week gaming company Valve made public a new operating system based on their game collection and environment: SteamOS. As Steam continues to be a central part of the gaming community here in 2013, dominating the world of digital distribution of games the world over, SlashGear took the opportunity to speak with one of the biggest names in gaming-aimed hardware about the subject: NVIDIA. As it turns out, NVIDIA has been hard at work behind the scenes with engineers onsite at Valve to optimize SteamOS from the start.

SteamOS is on the horizon - an operating system based in Linux made to run on a variety of devices called Steam Machines. The gaming company known as Valve suggests that their Steam Machines will become "a powerful new category of living-room hardware", having been created by a wide variety of manufacturers and working with unique hardware made for all manner of prospective gamers. At the base is the Valve prototype - a Steam Machine optimized for the living room, for gaming, and for Steam.

Those wishing to get in on the SteamOS environment early will be glad to hear Valve announcing their next step in the process towards final release- Steam Machines. What was once code-named Steam Box is now Steam Machine, and the prototype is coming up quick. While Valve will be working with a wide variety of manufacturers in the near future to deliver Steam Machines of all kinds, the first wave comes in prototype form, manufactured by Valve itself.

This week the gaming-centric company known as Valve has announced plans to release SteamOS, a living room-aimed operating system that will be free to download and free to license. This operating system is based on Linux architecture - similar to how Android is a Linux-based OS - and the company intends on expanding well beyond the confines of their current video games-based model with TV, movies, and music. Is Microsoft too big to fail? We're about to find out.

Mentioned almost as a footnote in today's release on their larger SteamOS headline, Valve has let it be known that they're entering into deals for multimedia delivery as well. Speaking on music, TV, and movies specifically, Valve has suggested that both SteamOS and Steam - the software client you use on your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine today - will be working with new media services soon. This set of services will likely converge on apps like Netflix and Hulu, while it's possible Valve will be bringing on their own media additions to their already successful Steam Store for games.

It would appear that Valve is opening the doors to the living room experience for Steam with a new operating system they're simply calling SteamOS. This operating system is based in Linux and will be "downloadable soon" and "free forever", just as the Steam client for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines is now. This operating system will be "designed for the TV and the living room" and will take full advantage of the Steam ecosystem already in place.

The Valve crew have made clear today - as if they'd not done so several times already - that they'll be growing beyond the traditional deep-dark-basement model for gaming in the year 2014. Word today comes from a Steam space with "livingroom" literally embedded in its URL, with "The Steam Universe is Expanding in 2014" at its head. Could this be the Linux Steambox we've been waiting for?

Steam already had a good setup in terms of being able to get and play games, however one bit that had been lacking was the ability to share those games with friends and family members. While that option is not yet available, it has been announced. This will be arriving as Steam Family Sharing and it will allow users to share their game libraries with others. The Family Sharing option is expected to arrive next week, however the initial rollout will be a beta with limited availability.

The gamer-created unofficial Half-Life modification Sven Co-Op has been announced to be going fully official (Steam game official, that is) this week by its makers. What this means for you, the lay person, is that you'll be seeing this game available inside Steam for free - downloadable and playable - where before today - and for the past 14 years or so - you'd have had to have downloaded it and loaded it yourself attached to the original game. Now it's all on its own and going big with help from the Steam team!